


mostly lilacs

by sinequanon



Category: Teen Wolf (TV), The Originals (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Future Fic, Hanahaki Disease, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-29
Updated: 2020-06-29
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:01:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24985750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinequanon/pseuds/sinequanon
Summary: The Mikaelsons are coming to town, and Stiles is having mixed feelings about it. Also, hugs.
Relationships: Peter Hale/Stiles Stilinski, Sheriff Stilinski & Stiles Stilinski, Stiles Stilinski & The Mikaelsons
Comments: 22
Kudos: 434





	mostly lilacs

**Author's Note:**

> A few notes for this one: Hanahaki disease is a trope that's uncommon in TW fics, so for those of you who don't know, it's a fictional disease whereby a person in unrequited love can potentially die because flowers start to grow in their lungs. I have taken that idea and twisted it a bit, here.
> 
> TW could potentially be canon complaint in this, depending on how you look at it. The only people mentioned as being part of the pack (other than Stiles and Peter) are Scott and Lydia, so feel free to imagine the pack of your choice. As far as Stiles's connection to the Originals: the pack knows a little about Stiles's past, but only the Sheriff and Peter know the whole story. I imagine Stiles and company to be in their mid-to-late twenties here.
> 
> The Originals is AU for this story; there was no Freya or Henrik.

Stiles stared at his reflection in the mirror and repressed the urge to sigh overdramatically like one of those stereotypical Victorian maidens. Maudlin really wasn't a good look for him, but the upcoming "party thinly disguised as genteel supernatural gathering" had been looming large in Stiles's thoughts for the past month--and tonight was the night that Stiles's life as he knew it could come to an end. Scott thought that Stiles was worried about vampires in general, and he was--all vampires were dangerous, Original ones doubly so--but not for the reasons the pack assumed.

Stiles loved his siblings--always and forever, and all that jazz--but he wasn't sure he wanted to see them. He wasn't sure he _could_ see them, and come out of the encounter unscathed. He was just a squishy human now, and he couldn't afford to get sick again. Gone was his vampiric strength and healing (which, frankly, had been a blessing back when he'd made the deal), and in its place was fragile skin and bone. It was a good trade, most of the time, even if Stiles had been forced to grow up all over again. He loved his dad, and Scott, and Peter, and Beacon Hills as a whole was pretty great if you could look past all of the supernatural drama. 

Which Stiles had for sixteen years, if only because he couldn't remember to look for it.

In fact, before Scott had been bitten, Stiles had been living a blissfully human life, broken only by the occasional wisp of memory or dream of something that used to be. It was good. It was enough.

And then Scott turned into a werewolf and life went crazy and Stiles was possessed and then he remembered.

People liked to say that Hanahaki was a merciful disease, and maybe it was for humans. But Stiles could remember how the love for his family (the longing, for them to stay together) had taken root in his lungs only a few years after they'd turned. They had all been pretty emotional (save Finn and Elijah) before they'd become vampires, and the change had heightened everyone's feelings past bearing. Finn had been swallowed up by loathing, Niklaus by fear, Kol by resentment, and Stiles...Stiles had drowned in love. Elijah and Rebekah had been too busy wrangling the other three to notice Stiles, which was fine, at first. Stiles, who coughed every so often, then more; who gasped and choked and trembled as blossoms pushed past his lips and fell with graceful nonchalance into the dirt.

Stiles was alone when he took his first last breath. He was alone almost a week later when he opened his eyes again. (He wasn't sure where his siblings were, but he was afraid to ask.) He walked away from his family, then, and tried to never look back.

It didn't work.

Stiles would be fine for a little while, and then he'd come across one of his siblings and the cycle of blood and flowers and death would begin again. After the fourth time Stiles woke up with lilacs in his throat and blood on his lips, he hired a witch to help him forget, hoping that would alleviate the pain. (Finn saved him.) The next witch, a century or so later, was kind enough to kill him. (It didn't take.) In the mid-eighteenth century, they came up with a way to surgically remove the disease. The downside was that it removed all feelings as well, but that was all right. The numbness was a relief. (At least for the next two hundred years.)

He couldn't remember when or where or how he'd met the witch who had given him this new life (for now, at least, she was nothing more than dark hair and a soft smile) but he'd be forever grateful for the respite. Now, his once-siblings were coming to Beacon Hills, and Stiles wasn't sure how to feel about it. Would they recognize him? Did he want them to? Did they even know that he had died, or that he'd been reborn? Stiles was older now than he had been when he'd first died, but he still looked largely the same as he had as a vampire. If they saw him and assumed he was a doppelgänger, would he be willing to let them believe it?

(For a moment, he could feel the tickle of flowers--roses and honeysuckle and forget-me-nots and lilac--at the back of his throat, and he had to suppress a shudder.)

"You know," his dad's voice was low and careful, but Stiles startled at the sound anyway, "you don't have to meet them. Peter's just waiting for an excuse to drag you off somewhere, and no one would question it if you decided not to go."

Stiles recognized the look on his dad's face, the one that said, "I support you, no matter what, and do I need to come up with an escape route?" and it made him want to laugh and cry in equal measure. Maybe all the death had been worth it to get to _this._

"I want to see them, but…" Stiles frowned, then shrugged.

Then his dad's arms were around him, and Stiles melted into the hug. "Ask yourself this question: if you don't meet them, will you regret it?"

Stiles shrugged again, helplessly, because yes, he probably would, even if he didn't want to admit it. His dad squeezed him tighter.

"If you're done freaking out for now, Peter will be here in about twenty minutes."

<> <>

Exactly twenty minutes later, Stiles and Peter were sitting on his dad's couch, pretending that they had nowhere else to be. Stiles leaned over until he was resting totally against the werewolf's side, his face smushed inelegantly against Peter's neck. "I'm sorry I ran out on you this morning."

"What for? It makes perfect sense that you would come here. You only stopped having nightmares about the nogitsune and your regained memories a few months ago. Now, you're potentially going to face the source of some of those nightmares; it makes sense that you'd come to where you felt the safest."

Stiles tried to sit up, because it wasn't like that, but Peter shifted to embrace the younger man instead. "It's not that I don't trust you--"

"I know, sweetheart," Peter soothed. "It's not the same." When Stiles let out a questioning hum, he added, "Did you know that I have a few items in storage that survived the fire? Nothing terribly important, or valuable, of course, but every time I go to throw them out, I find a reason to put it off."

Peter rearranged the two of them so that they were facing one another, and then reached out to take Stiles's face in his hands. "Your father told me that you've chosen to go to the party tonight. I'll support whatever you decide. But I want you to know that if, at any time, you change your mind, you need just say the word and I'll whisk you away for a very fun night in a rather pricey hotel."

(And considering that Peter had done just that a handful of times in the years they'd been together, particularly when Stiles had been stressed, both of them knew exactly what that "very fun night" would entail.)

"That hardly seems like an incentive for me to stick around," Stiles pointed out.

Peter grinned slyly. "If you can make it through the night, I have an entirely different reward planned."

As far as distractions went, it was an excellent one, because the werewolf managed to get Stiles in the car, drive to the venue, and actually make it onto the dance floor before Stiles's anxiety ratcheted up again. The hall was packed full of people, both supernaturally-inclined and otherwise, but Stiles couldn't stop his eyes from surveying the room as he waited for his siblings to arrive.

"Maybe they won't come."

Peter responded to that bit of ridiculousness by spinning Stiles into a deliberately showy dip, just to distract him.

<> <>

Stiles, Peter, and Lydia were in the middle of a not-quite-debate over the merits of sampling every item on the rather impressive dessert menu (Stiles was enthusiastically for, Peter supported whatever Stiles wanted, and Lydia claimed they had an image to maintain) when the Mikaelsons stepped into the room. It was impossible to miss them--everything seemed to pause, for a few seconds too long--until Kol broke the spell with a smirk and melted into the crowd, the others following after.

Stiles almost forgot how to breathe.

"Well, then," Lydia announced, bringing Stiles's attention back to her, "it looks like we'll be getting one of each of the desserts, after all. If I ruin my figure, I'll just eviscerate the first person to comment on it," she added with a smirk. She nodded to reinforce her pronouncement and all but forced Stiles into the chair next to her, while Peter settled much more gracefully on Stiles's other side. "There's no point in wandering around like a lost lamb when you can stay in one place and make them come to you."

"I don't--"

"I know that you haven't told the pack everything about your past, and I'm not going to make you," she flagged down one of the servers, gave the perplexed man their order, and continued, "but you can't keep going on like this." She ignored Peter's glare and grabbed Stiles's hand. Her voice softened. "I just want you to be happy."

"Cake will help," he assured her. And even if it didn't, running wouldn't do any good at this point--he'd felt eyes on him for the last ten minutes.

(Cake really did help--it was hard to be terrified while eating cake. And pudding. And pie.)

For the next half hour, the trio indulged themselves on a table full of sweets. Stiles was in the middle of distracting Peter in an effort to steal the last bit of chocolate mousse when Elijah approached their table. Intent on his prize, Stiles didn't even notice until Lydia pinched him.

"Ow, what was that for?" he groused, until he glanced in her direction. "Oh."

Elijah was staring at him with a mixture of such possessiveness and longing that Stiles's heart started pounding its way out of his rib cage, but if his brother was at all alarmed by his supposedly vampiric brother's sudden heartbeat, he didn't show it. He simply sat down at the table and pulled a strawberry tart towards himself.

The other three occupants of the table stared at him for far too long to be subtle; then they, too, resumed eating, and the next few minutes passed in silence.

"There's a grave for you, in Paris. Nik objected, of course, but Bekah insisted that you would find it amusing. It also gave us a place, however slight, to feel connected to you," Elijah finally spoke, and Stiles nearly dropped his fork. _They knew_? "She refused to let anyone leave flowers, though, for obvious reasons."

Stiles wasn't sure what his face looked like in that moment, but it obviously conveyed all of the questions he couldn't ask, because his brother continued. "A few decades ago, Niklaus decided that he wanted all of us in one place again. When you were the only one he couldn't find, we consulted a witch who, as it happened, was connected to the first witch who tried to help you." Elijah took a moment to stare at his plate before his gaze unerringly returned to Stiles. "The truth unfolded from there. We learned at the time that you were dead, and hadn't yet been reborn, so we waited for the day when we might make amends."

It was a strange feeling for Stiles, finding out that every fear that that had planted itself in his brain had been for nothing. But this was his older brother, and his opinion still mattered. He spotted both Finn and Kol standing together a few feet away, staring intently in their direction. Niklaus and Rebekah were likely listening in as well, even if Stiles couldn't see them. "It doesn't bother you that I'm not the same anymore?"

"Oh, Mieczysław," Elijah breathed, and he was around the table and pulling Stiles into his arms before the younger man could blink. "Please let us try to be worthy of you," the vampire whispered like a prayer, and Stiles finally lost his fight with the tears that had been threatening to fall since his brother started speaking.

Stiles wasn't sure how long he cried--or how Peter and Lydia managed to keep the rest of the pack away--but he came back to himself with more than one set of arms around him. 

"It's not fair that you get to be both the smartest and the best looking of us," Rebekah complained, mock-seriously. "The extra years look good on you."

He didn't get a chance to respond before he was pushed into Finn's hold. His eldest brother crushed Stiles against him and whispered apologies into his hair, while Kol welcomed him with a slap on the back and threats to his person if he ever went off and died again.

And then there was Niklaus, who had a gentleness in his eyes that Stiles had never quite seen before, and pulled him forwards with a "Hello, love; we've missed you," and Stiles was crying again, while his siblings shushed and soothed him in a way they hadn't done since they were all still human.

And if anyone noticed that the Original family was crying and hugging it out with a seemingly random human in the middle of a crowded party, they knew better than to mention it, ever, because if the Mikaelsons didn't get them for it, Peter Hale certainly would.

**Author's Note:**

> The title for this is inspired by part seven of Walt Whitman's poem, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d".
> 
> I'm so glad I managed to get this posted this month: first I had technical issues, and then personal ones. I'll probably wait a couple of weeks to reply to last month's comments because I hurt my hand the other day, and as someone with a disability who can really only use one hand, it's a pain in the rear right now. I mostly typed this on my phone, and autocorrect was being wonderfully creative in its suggestions. I think I caught them all, but point them out if I missed any and I'll fix them eventually.
> 
> Also, an update on my writing in general: I've got two other TW/Originals crossovers that are stalled at the moment; two Bleach ideas that I haven't started working with, but am hopeful about; one finished MCU fic that I'm not super pleased with, and one more I hope to write before I close that series out; part two of the Lucifer fic I left hanging; a couple of gen TW ideas (not BINGO-related); a couple of Stiles/Peter ideas; and the next part of my Clint/Stiles TW/MCU crossover that has been giving me conniptions for months.
> 
> Hopefully, something will shake loose in my head soon so I can get this stuff off my plate; I'm about five minutes away from posting a series of headcannons, just so I can declare the ideas done and over with.
> 
> Anyway, sorry for the rant, and thanks for reading!


End file.
